4,132 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2021
    1. One of the toughest parts of note taking systems can be moving from one to another, particularly digital ones, as the technical overhead is almost never easy and typically requires a huge amount of work. Wouter's description here may seem facile, but I'm sure it wasn't simple, not to mention the fact that he's got more facility with coding than the average person ever will.

      I do like the idea of basic text or markdown files that can be used in a variety of settings with relatively easy wiki mark up.

      Of the systems I've seen, this seems to be the most portable format, but it also requires software that supports it at the base level, but which still provides search and other useful functionalities.

    1. A relatively comprehensive view of Wouter Groeneveld's commonplacing workflow. There are a few bits missing here and there, but he's got most of the bigger basics down that a majority of people seem to have found and discovered.

      He's got a strong concept of indexing, search, and even some review, which many miss. There's some organic work toward combinatorial thought, but only via the search piece.

      I should make a list of the important pieces for more advanced versions to have. I've yet to see any articles or work on this.

    1. The seminal 1890 Harvard Law Review article The Right to Privacy—which every essay about data privacy is contractually obligated to cite—argued that the right of an individual to object to the publication of photographs ought to be considered part of a general ‘right to be let alone’.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Jenny</span> in left alone, together | The Roof is on Phire (<time class='dt-published'>05/08/2021 18:32:41</time>)</cite></small>

      See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)

    1. Markus Krajewski reminds us that Luhmann’s choice of interlocutor has a precedent in an 1805 piece by the novelist Heinrich von Kleist (see the chapter “Paper as Passion” in this collection).

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Daniela K. Helbig </span> in  Ruminant machines: a twentieth-century episode in the material history of ideas - JHI Blog (<time class='dt-published'>05/12/2021 21:27:02</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Ideas have a history, but so do the tools that lend disembodied ideas their material shape −− most commonly, text on a page. The text is produced with the help of writing tools such as pencil, typewriter, or computer keyboard, and of note-taking tools such as ledger, notebook, or mobile phone app. These tools themselves embody the merging of often very different histories. Lichtenberg’s notebooks are a good example, drawing as they do on mercantile bookkeeping, the humanist tradition of the commonplace book, and Pietist autobiographical writing (see Petra McGillen’s detailed analysis).

      I like the thought of not only the history of thoughts and ideas, but also the history of the tools that may have helped to make them.

      I'm curious to delve into Pietist autobiographical writing as a concept.

    1. Origin of Lindy's Law or the Lindy effect.

      A discussion of the life expectancy of a comic.

      What they miss here is that it's easier to produce if you're also consuming a lot of material, particularly in a group. The output is proportion to the input, and at the time there was only so much input that one could take in in a much sparser media market in comparison to 2021.

    1. Standard economic theory uses mathematics as its main means of understanding, and this brings clarity of reasoning and logical power. But there is a drawback: algebraic mathematics restricts economic modeling to what can be expressed only in quantitative nouns, and this forces theory to leave out matters to do with process, formation, adjustment, creation and nonequilibrium. For these we need a different means of understanding, one that allows verbs as well as nouns. Algorithmic expression is such a means. It allows verbs (processes) as well as nouns (objects and quantities). It allows fuller description in economics, and can include heterogeneity of agents, actions as well as objects, and realistic models of behavior in ill-defined situations. The world that algorithms reveal is action-based as well as object-based, organic, possibly ever-changing, and not fully knowable. But it is strangely and wonderfully alive.

      Read abstract.

      The analogy of adding a "verb" to mathematics is intriguing here.

    1. Turing was an exceptional mathematician with a peculiar and fascinating personality and yet he remains largely unknown. In fact, he might be considered the father of the von Neumann architecture computer and the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence. And all thanks to his machines; both those that Church called “Turing machines” and the a-, c-, o-, unorganized- and p-machines, which gave rise to evolutionary computations and genetic programming as well as connectionism and learning. This paper looks at all of these and at why he is such an often overlooked and misunderstood figure.
    1. We analyze features contributing to the success of a book by feature importance analysis, finding that a strong driving factor of book sales across all genres is the publishing house. We also uncover differences between genres: for thrillers and mystery, the publishing history of an author (as measured by previous book sales) is highly important, while in literary fiction and religion, the author’s visibility plays a more central role.

      The abstract generally tracks with my personal experience in the space.

    1. Perhaps I’m trying to use Obsidian for something it wasn’t intended – a note pad full of simple scratch notes that eventually become to-do lists, emails, blog posts, etc. It should be used to build a knowledge base – a collection of information that rounds out a subject. I just simply don’t do that type of note taking.

      I'm using it to do both of these things and definitely find it more useful for the knowledge base work. I've never used Simplenote heavily, but it's definitely more focused on your use case Colin.

      For the quick notes scratchpad idea, I've been relying on Markor and syncing the results from my phone to my Obsidian data store to get those notes into my notebook more easily. Often when I'm at my desktop I may move those notes to other more appropriate places to keep track of them. Hopefully Obsidian's mobile version (in beta) will make this portion easier.

    1. Sidewiki does another interesting thing - it matches comments to the same words elsewhere on the web. For example, my comment on Douglas Adams excellent 1999 piece also shows up in SideWiki on JP Rangiswami's blog where he quotes Douglas Adams too.This hints at a greater possibility for SideWiki - to weave the web together by better by showing commentary across the web from all places that quote and cite each other, correlating by textual quotation and adding annotated links to the commentary from people we trust most.
    1. If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can't really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.
    1. Their care for the communities and the journalists and creators that serve them is not isolated to the people who are explicitly paid to care about such things. That sense of service permeates the whole company. Seeing that has been a unique experience.

      Care for the communities? Really?! I'm not so sure here...

      However, we’re not moving fast enough.

      I'm also a bit reticent about the We're not moving fast enough part. Sure we need to help out journalists, but usually moving fast in the social space has been a disservice to the user.

    1. Ton delineates his ideas between notions, notes, ideas, and work notes. It's not too dissimilar to the ideas others like Maggie Appleton have written about various smaller pieces being built up from small "seedlings" into larger evergreen pieces within a digital gardens framing.

      I do like the idea of emergent outlines he notes over Ahrens' speculative outlines.

  2. Apr 2021
    1. An interesting outline of how Colin Madland uses Notion for his Ph.D. research work.

      He's got a good list of some pros and cons at the bottom. The export sounds a bit hairy on one front, but at least gives you some sort of back up in case the worst were to happen.

      Not sure it's the thing for me and I'm happier with my workflow using Obsidian at the moment, though some of the ideas about process here could be helpful.

      It looks like he's got some of the same issues in using Grav for his knowledge work as I do in WordPress, though the taxonomy and Webmention portions do tend to help me a bit.

      Colin brought this to my attention at the OERxDomains21 conference.

    1. I totally want to play around with both of these and host personal versions to play around with. Sadly some of the technical requirements for them always seem just beyond my reach. Perhaps I'll give it another go shortly.

      I do wonder what a Reclaim Cloud instance would end up running over time. I doubt I'd drive much traffic.

    1. "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (Spanish: "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins") is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges originally published in Otras Inquisiciones (1937–1952).[1][2] It is a critique of the English natural philosopher and writer John Wilkins's proposal for a universal language and of the representational capacity of language generally. In it, Borges imagines a bizarre and whimsical (and fictional) Chinese taxonomy later quoted by Michel Foucault, David Byrne, and others.